Dangers of Customized News and Feeds. Conspiracy Theories. Confirmation Bias. Online Echo Chambers
The following is an edited excerpt from the edX Course “Think101x The Science of Everyday Thinking”
Conversation with Stephan Lewandowsky
Q: People tend to believe some pretty weird things, from NASA faking the moon landing to pharmaceutical companies conspiring with government departments to keep people sick, and climate change obviously. Why does that happen? Why do people believe strange things like that?
A: People tend to focus selectively on what they consider to be “the evidence”. They may focus on one data point in the case of climate change, one thermometer somewhere that has been showing cooling for the last ten years. it is only one of about a billion different measurements that tell us that the climate is changing. Yet by focusing on just this one convenient piece of evidence that is protecting people’s worldview, they can be absolutely convinced that they’re right: “Look here, there is this one thermometer. It’s cooling,” and they’re ignoring absolutely everything else. It is difficult to get people to go beyond that one piece of evidence because doing so would imply that they have to change their opinion, and that’s a very difficult thing for people to do.
Q: One of the major drivers in the maintenance of people’s beliefs and the formation of their beliefs is the role of the media. The media clearly plays a large role. You encountered that yourself?
A: There’s an abundance of evidence to suggest that certain segments of the media have done a very poor job informing the public about a number of issues, from the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to climate change. The media are culpable to some extent. That is a serious problem, especially now that we have the ability to choose their own media by focusing on certain sources on the Internet. People have become more immersed in their own bubble of information they like, and that is what they are consuming to the exclusion of everything else.
So climate-change deniers don’t read “Green Left Weekly” or the scientific literature. the scientific literature isn’t being reported accurately by certain media organizations. It’s a serious political problem.
Q: People seem to have an anti-establishment bias, in that sense that the government, the scientists are trying to further their own interests at the expense of the public. You encountered that before?
A: A common element of conspiracy theories is that the official version is always wrong, whether the official version is something that a government is putting out, or a scientific body, or in the case of vaccinations, the pharmaceutical industry. It’s just one way for people to reject a fact—is by making up a conspiracy surrounding it. If you do not want to believe that tobacco is bad for you because you’re a chain smoker, then what are going to do? Say that all the medical scientists are conspiring because they want to deny you this fun, so they’re making up all the stuff. citing their grandfather who has smoked every day of his life and lived to 100. That is the purpose of conspiracy theories. They’re cherry-picking one piece of supporting evidence while they’re ignoring absolutely everything else. That’s also a characteristic of conspiratorial thinking.
Belief in conspiracy theories / Online Echo Chambers
Steve has been looking at the nature of conspiracy theories and how they’re operating, and he mentioned a couple of the psychological mechanisms that are operating. One is related to the confirmation bias when you’re only looking at the evidence that supports what you want to believe. climate-change deniers actually only cite the evidence that doesn’t support the fact that the climate is changing due to human involvement – Paying attention to that one thermometer and ignoring the others. That’s the confirmation bias in a sense and cherry-picking the evidence that you’re looking for.
This is related to a really nice paper by Hastorf and Cantril in 1954. There’s a football match that was happening, fans watching the same football game, and you ask fans about their perceptions of dirty play during this football game. Each team reported that the other team was playing dirtier than their own. Yes, they’re watching exactly the same game, but they have completely different perceptions.
The news that you get is always based on a subset of news in some respects. People who read Facebook are only exposed to information from their friends on Facebook, very like-minded individuals. In fact, things like Facebook and Google only show you the things that you like and therefore probably agree with, which is going to bias you even further. When you do a Google search, the information that it pops up is not the information that I would get when I do the same search. We’re suffering from false consensus. You have this perception that other people think the same way that you do.
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IT Architecture 101. Types of Architecture
The IT Architecture is a complex phenomena. Just like an apartment has floor plans, electrical drawings, topo map, plumbing drawings, etc. there are plenty of architectures / views for any system / application. From a development perspective, here are four architectures (in as much plain English as possible).
1. Business processes / BPM: You deal with this to not only know the business, but also to eliminate redundant & non-value added processes. When you automate some business processes, a few things should get eliminated. For example, in real world you may have a person pick the documents and keep them in a store-room. This whole process doesn’t apply when the data (documents) get stored in hard-drives or cloud
2. Data Architecture: Data sensitivity / classification, retention period, role-based access, approval hierarchy, data custodian, etc.
3. Solution Architecture: Semi-technical. Define the components & their interaction with one another
Forrester says, “Solution architects are responsible for defining the business solution “platform” upon which the initial project and future solutions are built. This includes assembling and documenting the architectural requirements for the strategic solution”. But, it cautions, “The definition of the solution architect role and responsibilities varies widely from firm to firm, changes over time, and often isn’t very clear. Some firms will emphasize the role as a business advisor, and others expect solution architects to fill the role of project design authority” (Solution Architecture Tool Kit: Overview)
4. Technical Architecture: IDE, GUI tools, DB Servers topology, number of app servers, load balancing, which apps use which server, etc (The last two are sometimes called Infrastructure View).
** Thanks Shameel for the discussion on this **
If you want an academic level overview, please read Architectural Blueprints — The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture
Source: https://wiki.cantara.no/display/dev/4+plus+1+View+Model
There are plenty of other architectures. Here are some:
5. Enterprise Architecture (EA), with its frameworks like TOGAF, Zachman, etc. should deal with strategic objectives of the enterprise, and ideally be dealt at the CIO level.
6. Gartner says “AA (application architecture) is a subset of enterprise solution architecture (ESA) which, in turn, is a subset of a complete EA” (“Application Architecture Overview, Part 1: General Context and Scope”)
The below diagram from Gartner shows the Value Chain for Architecture Disciplines (“The Distinction Between Enterprise Architecture and Application Architecture Makes a Difference to Business Outcomes”, 2014)
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IT Cultures, Processes, and Your Employability
Summary
The IT employees should keep an eye on what’s happening in the industry, and take appropriate actions. If you have to the leave (either voluntarily or laid-off/fired from) your current company, you don’t want to find that you are NOT employable. For instance, you realize that you don’t have experience in certain processes when recruiters ask for those, lack knowledge of some technology, you spent too many years at a lower level, or your pay was so high that other companies refuse to hire you (Many large Indian IT companies are reluctant to hire anyone with a pay less than your last pay, even if you are out-of-job). The appropriate action could be learning, moving to a different team, or moving to a different company even with a pay-cut.
Types of IT Companies
1. Captive units are offshore IT units of large US/European non-IT companies, like Ford, RBS, etc. IT folks at captive serve just one company, though there may be multiple departments/portfolios
2. Service companies offer consulting, outsourcing & IT project development & maintenance. Examples are TCS, HCL, Cognizant, etc. Service folks, well, serve multiple clients/companies and oftentimes in multiple geographies.
3 & 4. There are IT product companies (e.g.: SAP, Oracle, etc.) and “internet” companies (i.e. they aren’t accessible if your internet access is down) like FB, Google etc.
Some companies fall into more than one category. So, don’t read too much into the examples.
Company Cultures
When a housemaid works at multiple homes, she is exposed to multiple cultures, appliances, devices, etc. That is a way to look at the experience you gain in IT Service companies. In captive units, you work at just one “home” which may expose you to modern management cultures, processes and technologies. Or, it may stick to old technologies, old-methodologies (e.g.: Waterfall method to deliver IT projects) and even outdated attitude/outlook (“No cloud for me, please. I want to touch my UNIX/Windows Server”, “Open Source is slow”).
Of course, some portfolios/units of a captive unit may embrace modern technologies / tools while others don’t, but most likely the culture & processes won’t be modern.
In some captives, employees are over-titled, i.e. they are given titles that don’t match the responsibilities and tasks they do. For example, if all you do is get requirements from your US parent company, and deliver those requirements month after month, no one else calls this Project Management.
[Source: LMC Software]
Two examples for the Culture/Processes
A) “Facebook has roughly 1,000 development engineers and three release engineers who orchestrate the daily and weekly pushes. However, it doesn’t have a separate quality assurance (QA) team or any other designated testers“. The developers do Unit tests for their code, and the code goes thru some automated tests. There are reasons for the absence of Testing team.
- Developers know the code better than testers, so developers should test the code
- They don’t want to create the ‘developers are better / more important than testers’ culture
- “Personal responsibility by the engineers who wrote the code can replace quality assurances obtained by a separate testing organization”
{Source: “Development and Deployment at Facebook”, IEEE Internet Computing,July-Aug 2013}
If you are a QA person / tester, think how long it will take for this thought-process to be adopted by more companies
B) The amazon’s (AWS) database offerings (like RDS, Aurora, etc), Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, etc. have made creating, managing and extending databases and DB objects a lot quicker and easier even for non-DBAs. Installing, configuring and managing databases in the cloud now looks like a child’s play. If you are a DBA, what’d be the impact of these for your job opportunities or career growth?
Criticality of IT
IT is important for any company, but IT isn’t the core in many. In a waste management company the garbage trucks are more critical than your programs/servers. If your Telecom company’s billing application or database servers are down for a day, your CEO may not even know that. Yes, the bill generation and related items will be affected for a day. But, that is not as serious as wire-line or wireless network issues. If a section of the call-center employees or technicians of a telecom company could possibly go on a strike, the company gets in a panic (or, preparation for the possible strike) mode. If a section of IT employees quit, no executive would bat an eye.
I’m not suggesting we should work only at the companies where IT is critical. But, it is important to be realistic about your own importance, or even IT’s importance. I have seen people who think their job is safe because s/he is the only person who knows the entire app, or the only Production DBA, or with similar thought process.
Skills, Competency & Employability
At the lower levels (Software Engineers, Analysts, etc.), the skills required are primarily technical & analytical, and are pretty similar across the IT companies. But, competencies / skills expected at higher levels vary widely.
For example, in Service companies, the project managers do pre-sales activities. The Senior PMs do manage budgets. But, these mayn’t happen at captive units. Since IT/project delivery is the lifeline for service, IT & internet companies, you see them adopting modern practices like Agile, DevOps, Open Source software, etc.
As for captive units, some adopt & some don’t. Senior employees from captive units, without any pre-sales, consulting & budgeting experience AND without any exposure to Agile or DevOps, are at a disadvantage when they look for openings outside.
It is not just for managers. If you are a developer with 10+ years of experience, are you sure you can join others as a developer? Many Indian companies will expect architecture skills from someone with 10+ years of experience.
Workplace predictions from Gartner
- By 2020, as much as 65% of knowledge worker career paths will be disrupted by smart machines in both positive and negative ways.
- By 2020, non-routine work will account for more than 65% of U.S. jobs (up from 60% in 2013)
{Source: “Workplace Reimagined: Four Scenarios to Help Visualize the Future”, Gartner, 2015}
Five factors that contribute to unemployability
1. Lack of knowledge (e.g.: don’t know the DevOps tools, open-source development softwares, etc.)
2. No experience in certain processes (e.g.: Scrum, Automated Testing, DevOps, etc.)
3. Too many years in a position (The perception, in India, is that you don’t have potential)
4. High salary: Many large Indian IT companies refuse to offer jobs with a pay packages (CTC) less than your last received pay
5. Hyper-titles: In some captives, employees’ titles don’t reflect their actual responsibilities. e.g.: A person may be a “Senior Project Manager”, but in reality primarily does the job of a Technical/Project Lead
Conclusion
Let’s keep an eye on the changing nature of work, culture, processes and technologies used by major companies. Mere reading about budgeting, scrum, enterprise agile, PaaS / SaaS, DevOps, Microservices, Digital Workplace, Smart Machines, consulting, etc. won’t help us get our next job. Depending on our situations, we may need get out before we rust out.
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CA படிப்பதற்கு B.Com தேவையில்லை
CA படிக்க ஆசைப்பட்டால் பத்தாவது முடித்த உடனேயே ICAI http://www.icai.org/ அமைப்பில் பதிவு செய்யுங்கள். அவர்கள் தரும் கோர்ஸ் / பாட புத்தகங்களை படித்தாலே +2வில் 90% மேல் வாங்கலாம்.
12வது முடித்தவர்கள் உடனேயே பதிவு செய்து வரும் டிசம்பர் மாதம் CPT தேர்வு எழுதுங்கள். டிசம்பர் 2015-இல் IPCC (INTERMEDIATE) தேர்வு எழுதுங்கள்.You can take coaching for the subjects. Not all of them charge a lot.
அதன் பின்னர் 3 வருடம் ஒரு ஆடிட்டரிடம் வேலை பார்த்துக்கொண்டே (5,000 முதல் 10,000 வரை மாதம் STIPEND கிடைக்கும்), FINAL EXAMS and IT COURSES படிக்க வேண்டும்.
12வது முடித்து, 1.5 வருடங்களில் ரூபாய் 5,000 முதல் 10,000 வரையும், 4.5 வருடங்களில் மிக எளிதாக ரூபாய் 25,000+ சம்பாதிக்கலாம். இதற்க்கு தேவை கடின உழைப்பு & விடா முயற்சி. இதற்க்கு ரூபாய் லட்சங்கள் செலவு செய்ய தேவையில்லை.
வெளிநாடுகளில் உள்ளவர்களுக்கு: சில வெளிநாட்டு நகரங்களில் (உதாரணம்: துபாய்) எக்ஸாம் எழுதலாம்
பி.காம் படித்தால் என்ன ஆகும்?
1. இரண்டரை (2.5) வருடங்கள் வீணாகும்
2. 12வது வரை நன்கு படித்தவர்கள், காலேஜ் வந்ததும் ரிலாக்ஸ் ஆவார்கள். ACCOUNTANCY, COMMERCE படிப்புகள் இவ்வளவு தானா என நினைக்கலாம். இதை முடித்தபின், CA படிப்பதற்கு மிக கஷ்டப்படலாம்.
நன்றி: Conversation with Auditor Rifai, FCA
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